keywords: Ireland

'I voted 'yes' in last year's ABS survey on same sex marriage. As a priest, I was prepared to explain why I was voting 'yes' during the campaign. I voted 'yes', in part because I thought that the outcome was inevitable. But also, I thought that full civil recognition of such relationships was an idea whose time had come.' — Frank Brennan, 2018 Castan Centre Human Rights Conference

If you are inclined to discount expert opinion from medicos, lawyers and criminologists, you could consider the evidence of your own eyes. Observe the body language around you if a parent hits their kid in public. A hush descends and tension increases. Post-Royal Commission, violence against kids is more and more on the nose.

Amid the shock and grief for Anthony Bourdain's death, one blue-tick Twitterer attempted to capture five minutes of shameful fame, declaring that religious people believe hell or purgatory is his afterworld destination. While all the great religious traditions generally proscribe suicide, they also contain nuanced views of the suicide's fate.

Tony Taylor's study of the funding of Australian schools from the time when Menzies first aided Catholic schools until today explains how school funding has come to pose such an intractable problem for governments. It is also a lament for so many lost opportunities to build an educational framework that would open opportunity to all.

The result in Ireland is a timely reminder to political and/or church leaders in Australia who like to use Irish Catholic heritage as a way to defend their conservative views. On nearly all issues that have been debated by Australian Catholics against their religious obligations, the motherland is, clearly, no longer the source of moral legitimacy.

The word 'irony' is sometimes preceded by 'delicious'. But it is sour and wounding in Ireland, where British withdrawal from the EU, Brexit, and the Irish Republic's firm intention to remain, raises the possibility of what pundits call a 'hard' border between the Republic and Northern Ireland.

A common response to voters behaving badly is to call for qualifications on the franchise, such as education, or the outsourcing of public policy decisions to experts. Instead, I'd argue the opposite: the problem is not democracy, it is the deficit. It is not that too many people have a say in how society is run, but rather not enough.

Punish A Muslim Day has come and gone. While we won't know for a few months if there was a statistical increase in the number of reported attacks on Muslims, the campaign's real purpose was simply to reiterate a message of stigma and exclusion. This is what makes the various counter-campaigns so important.

I am so pressed by memories poached in warm air, that I step a good way around circling pavement ants. Though experts say nothing positive about the world, despite the encroaching dark I might just pin badges of purple hibiscus flowers on anyone to hand.

Nur Warsame hopes to open a gay-friendly mosque, quite a feat, in a country where mosque applications often face fierce resistance from non-Muslim locals. Gay Muslims are mostly rejected by the Muslim community for being gay and stigmatised by the wider community for being Muslim. Many cannot reconcile the two identities.

In the ensuing debate, we shouldn't let ourselves forget that this postal vote never should have happened in the first place, and nothing like this should happen again to any minority group. The public voting yes or no on human rights is not what democracy looks like.

The world is often characterised as porous and easy to manoeuvre in this age of unparalleled technology and a globalised economy. But it's only ever been this way to people who have a combination of a particular passport and cultural heritage, particularly in settler colonial nations such as Australia.